Other than turning a willfully blind eye, there is no way to avoid the following comparison. Doing that, however, both handcuffs me as a writer and potentially insults you as a gamer; so I’m just going to get it out of the way. If it wasn’t for the designer and licensing agreements, Doctor Who: Nemesis could have easily been part of Ravensburger’s Villainous series. If I’m going to be bluntly honest, it probably would have been better served if it had been part of it, even under a co-publishing deal. Why? Because gameplay aside, there is a sizeable tabletop game franchise already called Nemesis which means you have to say the full “Doctor Who: Nemesis” title or risk confusing people. In fact, even if you do use the whole title, there are a lot of gamers who will still get confused. Seriously, I had to clarify what the game is to probably 90% of the people I talked to. Plus, if you’ve played any version of Villainous, you already have a good idea of how Doctor Who: Nemesis plays. If you haven’t that’s also ok, I’ll do my best to walk you through it.
Each player will take on the persona of one of the Doctor’s classic nemeses: Daleks, Cybermen, Weeping Angels, or The Master. Each nemesis has a unique, double-sided, control board with a different faction or iteration of their chosen nemesis. I’ll go into more detail on each of those in a later article, but as an example, as the Daleks you would play as Davros or as the Dalek Emperor. Each player also has a unique deck of cards for their chosen nemesis and an additional set of cards added to that for their chosen faction. Further added to their deck are cards representing two randomly selected Doctors (Doctors 1-13 plus the War Doctor).
On their turn, a player will choose one of the four locations on their control board, which will determine what actions they are allowed to take during that turn. These actions are generally some combination of drawing cards, playing cards with specific traits, moving cards around, and/or gaining tokens. One of the more important card types is Character cards, which are split between Hero cards (usually The Doctor or Companions) and Nemesis cards (usually Minions). While most Nemesis cards are played at locations on your own control board, Hero cards can be played on any player’s board depending on your personal strategy at the time. When a Companion card is played on a location, it forces that player to pass on one of the actions listed there, whereas a Doctor forces the player to pass on both actions. The most common way to rid yourself of Heroes is through the Conflict Step of a turn.
Conflict isn’t normally automatic, but when initiated a player adds up the combined power of any characters and modifiers at the location, commits any power tokens they wish, and plays/activates any cards that trigger during the conflict step. Then players roll a die (a different custom die for each nemesis, for the record) and add that to their total. Cards with a conflict trigger may be activated during any and all conflicts, even when a player isn’t otherwise directly involved. All heroes work in concert, regardless of the owner, whereas each player’s minions only work with that player’s other minions. Yes, it’s possible that more than one player may have minions involved in the same conflict, but so far that hasn’t happened in any of my games. The losing side has been thwarted and all cards are placed into their respective owner’s discard pile, with the exception of the Doctor. Doctors are not thwarted, they are captured and placed at the top of the victor’s control board. Having captured Doctors can often trigger a win condition.
Prior to the Conflict Step, there is a Minion Step, that allows players to play or move a single minion, which may be beneficial during the optional Conflict Phase, but it’s important to remember that the main Action Step of a turn doesn’t happen until after the Conflict Step. This is important because many actions can bring into play cards that may impact a Conflict, and the results of a Conflict will impact the available actions at that location. The results of a Conflict may also impact potential win conditions for every player in the game.
As far as general mechanics go, that covers most of them. But what makes the game fun, challenging, and replayable, is not what every player can do but what each player can do exclusively. As I mentioned earlier, each player has a unique deck of cards, which is then customized by their chosen faction and random Doctors. This customization is also where the potential for future expansion products will likely be. If you have already gleaned what you want to know from this review, I’m going to bring it to a close in a moment here. For those wanting to know more, You’ll be able to read part two in the near future, where I will look at the different nemeses that can be played, as well as a brief look at the Doctors.
Doctor Who: Nemesis is an unusually challenging game to review because it has an unusually bumpy learning curve. The basics are fairly simple, but until they’ve played a lot, every player in every game is probably going to have a different experience with a new learning curve in almost every game. Honestly, my biggest complaint isn’t even with how the game plays, but a minor but common packaging detail. The insert fits the four control boards perfectly, with little space to add anything else. But below that, there is too much space. There are five card wells, one for each player, plus the heroes. but each well is deep enough to hold 3-4 decks in them and only three of them have anything (the control boards) to keep cards from flying everywhere. I went online and found a customizable tuck box template and played arts and crafts during an episode of the Legend of the Traveling TARDIS to assemble them. Even if Gale Force Nine put out official “prettier” printable options for the decks I’d be thrilled. I happened to have access to appropriately coloured crafting cardstock, but still printed a few on basic white printer paper to make sure they worked right. I also managed to misspell “Wheeping” Angel and didn’t want to waste more paper and time to fix it.
Given the opportunity, I’d play Doctor Who: Nemesis anytime, and I’m going to be taking advantage of splitting this review into two parts to play a few more times. There are just too many combinations to work through and too much fun to be had.
Gale Force Nine can be found at www.gf9.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/GaleForceNine.
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